College Football Nation: Early season rankings full of surprises

Thursday

Rankings are always inexact, especially at this time of year when a lot of records are the result of playing patsies.

Rankings are always inexact, especially at this time of year when a lot of records are the result of playing patsies.

But most teams have now played a third of their schedule, and the rest are a quarter of the way through their respective seasons, so the polls are starting to round into some semblance of what they’ll look like when the weather turns cold and leaves explode with color. And in those polls are some curiosities, surprises that will add luster to autumn as it progresses.

The very top is about what was expected, with USC, Georgia, Oklahoma and Florida holed up until further notice.

But down the list a bit is something fun. Down near the bottom, just above those others receiving votes, is Vanderbilt. Freakin’ Vanderbilt. The school that every now and then puts a nice basketball team together and makes a March Madness run, the school that plays in that weird arena with the benches under the baskets.

Well, the football team is 4-0. It debuted in the AP poll at No. 21 this week, and squeaked into the coaches poll at No. 25. It’s the first time the Commodores have been ranked since 1984, when they stayed in the polls for a grand total of one week. They’re off this weekend, then play Auburn next Saturday.

“We had a four-week period that went very well for us, but it was time to have a break,” Vanderbilt coach Bobby Johnson said during the SEC’s weekly conference call. “Hopefully, we’re going to get some guys healed up and rested and continue to work on fundamentals and try to get better and try to be ready to take on a very fine Auburn team next week.”

Now, 4-0 at this point in the season can be a complete mirage. It can be the result of playing some bad teams before getting into the meat of the schedule. Vanderbilt opened the season with a win over Miami (Ohio) and also got a victory over Rice in the third game. But those were sandwiched around a 24-17 win over South Carolina, which was ranked at the time, and this past weekend the Commodores won at Ole Miss.

No, the two wins within the SEC aren’t against the best of the best the conference has to offer - there’s no Florida or LSU notch in the belt - but even if Vanderbilt is a middling team in the SEC it’s a huge leap, a huge change from the past.

Vanderbilt won just two games for three straight seasons from 2002 through 2004. It won five in 2005, dropped to four in 2006 and then climbed back to five last year. An 8-4 season would be a brilliant improvement, especially considering the conference the Commodores play in.

And the schedule does get more difficult. Quickly.

Auburn comes calling in Nashville next weekend - that’s the Auburn team that very nearly beat LSU late last Saturday night - then comes a trip to Mississippi State followed by a visit to Athens, Ga., and perhaps the best team in the land.

“We don’t talk about the end of the season,” Johnson said. “We talk about what we’re doing right now and try to stay in focus on the task at hand, and right now we’re trying to think about Auburn. That’s going to be a huge game for us. That’s all we’re thinking about.”

Another surprise is perhaps the polar opposite of Vanderbilt from a historic perspective. Where the Commodores have been bad - very bad - there’s another SEC team that’s one of the giants of college football’s past but has been out of national consciousness in recent years. It wasn’t a matter of if Alabama would again be great, but when. Once Nick Saban was hired before the start of the 2007 season, “when” became “how soon?”

The Crimson Tide are up to No. 8 in the AP poll, and they’re ranked 10th by the coaches. And they’ve looked good getting there.

Alabama has a couple of wins over teams from non-BCS conferences - Tulane and Western Kentucky - but the Tide has also crushed Clemson and Arkansas, handing each its only loss to date. Journeys to Georgia - tomorrow night - and LSU remain, but the rest of the schedule is pretty favorable, meaning Alabama could be looking at nine or 10 wins in just the second season under Saban.

“Our team is coming off a win at Arkansas, and didn’t execute as well as we’d like to in some areas and we’re focusing on improvement,” Saban said. “Certainly we need to be hitting on all cylinders against a team like Georgia which has an outstanding team, one of the best teams in the nation.”

The Alabama offense isn’t statistically brilliant - it’s 14th in the nation running the ball but just 105th in passing yardage. The defense, however, has been tremendous to date. It absolutely obliterated a Clemson team that’s scored 45, 27 and 54 in three games since. It’s giving up just 243.25 yards per game - 14th in the country - and the 9.25 points allowed per game is eighth best in the nation.

“After reviewing the film after the Arkansas game, our players really played hard, and I am proud of the way they were physical in the game, controlled the line of scrimmage, ran the ball very effectively and really made plays in the game when we needed to them,” Saban said. He added, however, “There are a significant amount of things that we probably need to improve on.”

A few other curiosities from the polls: Eight of the top 10 teams in both the media and coaches polls come from the SEC and Big 12 conferences, with only USC out of the Pac-10 and Wisconsin from the Big Ten crashing; Southern Cal, ranked No. 1, is the only Pac-10 team in the AP poll (Oregon is ranked by the coaches) while the Mountain West has three ranked teams - BYU, Utah and TCU; with Nebraska and Oklahoma State both undefeated and just outside the top 25, the Big 12 could have seven ranked teams in a few days.

What We Learned

As the weeks progress, as the first month of the season nears its close, it’s crystal clear that there is a massive difference in quality among the major conferences.

It was pretty obvious that the SEC and Big 12 were going to be the best this season, and that the ACC and Big East - among the six BCS conferences - were the two worst. But what wasn’t apparent was how bad the Pac-10 would also be.

The Big Ten falls somewhere in the middle. Ohio State clearly isn’t the great team it appeared to be before the games began, but the Buckeyes are at least decent. So are Wisconsin, Penn State and Illinois.

The Pac-10 has one team and then nothing. The rest of the conference has been a wasteland through four weeks of the season. Oregon, which was beaten at home by Boise State last weekend, was merely the latest team from the league to suffer embarrassing defeat. California, Arizona State and UCLA - among Pac-10 teams expected to at least be OK - had already been humiliated.

Unfortunately, the putrid nature of Pac-10 football could have consequences for the one good team in the conference. USC seemingly claimed a spot in the BCS Championship Game by beating up Ohio State. It’s hard to see the Trojans losing the rest of the way, so a shot at the national title seems an almost foregone conclusion. But imagine a scenario in which Oklahoma and Georgia also go undefeated - or Florida and Missouri, or LSU and Texas.

Who gets to play for the national championship? Probably not the one that had one strong opponent early in the season but played no one of note the rest of the way.

“We have a ridiculously difficult schedule going through the conference and we don’t address where they’re ranked,” USC coach Pete Carroll said.

He added, “We have a way that deal with our opponents and our scheduling that we’ve always done, and it has nothing to do with what anyone else thinks. ... Every game for us is a championship, an enormous event and opportunity. It doesn’t matter what the setting is.”

Despite Carroll’s narrow focus on the task at hand and concentration on merely what he and his team can control, it’s stunning how bad the Pac-10 has been to date. The consequence a few months from now could be even more stunning.

Game of the Week

Georgia took care of business last week, going out to the Arizona desert and dispatching the Sun Devils in the first real test of its season. The second test comes tomorrow night when Saban’s Crimson Tide come calling on Sanford Stadium in Athens.

It’s the night the Bulldogs show they’ll be part of the national championship race well into the season or fall way behind. It’s also the night Alabama can vault into that race.

“If you are a competitor you like to compete in games where great players are going to be out there,” Saban said. “You can see how well you get your team prepared to play in a challenging situation. Obviously, there will be a lot of adversity to overcome.”

“The big thing right now is to make sure we are focusing on our plan and the execution of the plan, making sure it’s not too much and that everyone understands it well,” said Georgia coach Mark Richt. “It’s an exciting week for us in that it’s a matchup of two top-10 teams, (ESPN) Gameday is in town and the seniors wanted to black it out.

“I think it’s going to be a wonderful college experience, and hopefully we can cap it off with a win.”

Should the Bulldogs win, a 7-0 start seems almost assured. They get two weeks off before hosting a Tennessee team that’s fallen far, then they host Vanderbilt, which is showing itself to be a good team but isn’t near the class of those who live among the top five in the polls.

After that comes perhaps the toughest back-to-back games any team will face all season - at LSU followed by Florida in Orlando.

Alabama, meanwhile, is staring 9-0 dead in the face if it beats Georgia. The next four on the schedule are Kentucky, Misissippi, at Tennessee and Arkansas State before a journey to LSU’s version of Death Valley.

Simply, on Saturday night we get another elimination game.

If I Had a Ballot ...

1. USC (2-0): Last night the Trojans made the always-interesting trip to Corvallis, where they’ve lost the last two times they’ve visited.

2. Georgia (4-0): Good win last weekend; potential for a great win this weekend.

3. Florida (3-0): Teams aren’t supposed to do to Tennessee what they did to Tennessee, but does that say more about Florida or Tennessee?